Mormons are less Republican this year, and Trump is not the only reason why

September 15, 2016

4 Min Read

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and conference-goers sing at the first session of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' 185th Annual General Conference in Salt Lake City on April 4, 2015. Photo courtesy of REUTERS/George Frey
*Editors: This photo may only be republished with RNS-RIESS-COLUMN, originally transmitted on September 16, 2016.

Trump’s inability to capture the vote of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems reflected in the Pew numbers: In 2012, 78 percent of Mormons said they were Republican or “leaned” Republican, compared to just 69 percent this year.

In fact, late last year the church, which does not officially endorse political candidates or tell Latter-day Saints how to vote, issued a statement emphasizing the value of religious freedom — which is not consistent with Trump’s stated plan to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. The timing of the announcement was not lost on the church-owned Deseret News, whose headline read, “LDS Church releases statement on religious freedom while Donald Trump’s Muslim controversy swirls.”

But to focus solely on Trump as the reason for the Mormon shift vis-a-vis the GOP is a bit short-sighted, for a couple of reasons.

First, and most significant, the 2011-2012 election season was an outlier in LDS affiliation with the GOP. In 2011, fully 80 percent of Mormons said they were Republican or leaned Republican; in 2012, as we’ve seen, it was 78 percent. Those numbers are sky-high — not just compared to this year’s, but to almost any other year’s.

The 80 percent rate is the highest it’s been since 1994, when Mormons, like many others in America, were swept up in the tide of the GOP’s Contract with America. Most of the time, the Mormon-GOP love affair has been around 60 or 70 percent. So what we’re seeing now may simply be a return to historic norms after the excitement Mormons felt in 2012 when their own native son — Mitt Romney — was in the running.

Another nuance I think is important is that the Mormon move away from the GOP reflects a wider trend: Mormons, as a people, are a little more likely to have a college degree than the national average. And people with a college degree, Pew finds, are more likely to affiliate as Democrats (53 percent) than as Republicans (41 percent).

Also, Mormons are a relatively young faith in terms of the age of its adherents. Among millennial voters in the general electorate, only 36 percent say they are Republican or “lean” Republican, compared with 57 percent who skew Democratic. The numbers are a little more Republican-friendly among Gen-Xers, but not by a whole lot. So since Mormonism has a youthful base, some partisan shifting makes sense.

So I would point out that the Mormon trends are in keeping with some of the larger changes in party affiliation in America. Along these lines, here’s what Benjamin Knoll, an associate professor of politics at Centre College, says about this week’s Pew numbers:

The fact that Republican identification has been going down over the last two decades among Mormons is not terribly surprising given that this largely matches national trends in partisan identification. Those identifying as Democrats or Republicans have been decreasing while “Independent” identification has been on the rise, which we see mirrored among Mormons.

However, he has this caveat:

The more interesting story to me is the trend you can observe when partisans are combined with partisan “leaners” – those who say that they are “Independent” but then also say they lean toward one party or another. Leaners tend to think and vote in many ways similar to their partisan counterparts. And when you look at partisanship among Mormons when leaners are included, we see a slow but steady rise in Republican identification over the last decade. This again makes sense in terms of national trends where highly religious people are sorting more and more into the Republican Party and less religious secular folks are sorting more and more into the Democratic Party.

It remains to be seen whether this slight drop in Republican identification in 2016 is part of a new ongoing trend or whether it’s a temporary “blip” due at least partially to the “Trump Effect.”

About the author

Jana Riess

Senior columnist Jana Riess is the author of many books, including "The Prayer Wheel" (2018) and "The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church," which will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2019. She has a PhD in American religious history from Columbia University.

If the “Mormons turn blue”, as you are hoping, it will only show that they are drifting even further from the teachings of the Scriptures by being indifferent to the hazards that the liberal Dems. have demonstrated by drifting further into a socialist ideology with its disregard for the nation’s morality and it’s Marxist forms of control over individual lives.

It is a lame excuse and false logic for a “religious” organization to throw the baby out with the bathwater by using their dislike of Trump’s personality in lieu of defeating the metastasis of Marxist cancer and the lethal foreign policies that have already infected our nation.

With the next Julian Assange release of purloined emails and data trails, we’ll likely find that the Mormon Church has made some significant donations to the Clinton Foundation. Wherever the’s a hot market for government influence, you’ll find wealthy Mormons, checkbooks in hand!

I guess your ideology is quite clear. According to your interpretations, the things I find to be true and right are, in fact, all wrong. One of the things I’ve learned from experience in the comment sections is that people such as yourself, who flatly state they are right, might as well be left to it. There is no room for discussion.

i work for the CDC nd have worked for HS in the past 10 years,i know the crime stats that are never released to the public..mormons by % rape the most kids..its a sick religion and a million times worse that islam in america